Samsung S3650 Corby

Full Review

Targeted at young people interested in social networking while on the move, Samsung's S3650 Corby is an entry-level touch-screen mobile phone. Featuring interesting styling and replaceable, snap-on rear covers, the Samsung S3650 offers plenty of features for its target market.

Features

The S3650 borrows much inspiration from other Samsung mobile phones, especially the Star 3G and the Jet. It runs Samsung's proprietary OS and features the company's TouchWIZ UI. TouchWIZ provides a three-page home screen and has a big focus on widgets. A row of widgets sits on the left edge of each screen and users simply press and drag icons from the panel to the main area to use a widget. Each of the three home screen pages is customisable.

An advantage the Samsung S3650 has is its social networking apps, particularly Facebook and Twitter. The S3650 has dedicated Facebook, MySpace and Twitter applications. You can update your status and Tweet from the phone's home screen.Although a 2G network connection is enough to quickly update your status, browsing through photos, for example, will occur at a snail's pace.

The Samsung S3650 has a 2 megapixel camera without a flash, a handy music recognition application similar to the iPhone app Shazam and Sony Ericsson's TrackID service, and a microSD card slot for extra storage. The card slot is annoyingly located under the battery cover, but this is not difficult to remove. The S3650 includes Bluetooth and USB connectivity, though the latter uses a proprietary Samsung port. There is no GPS or Wi-Fi, but at this price point the absence of Wi-Fi is understandable (although the Nokia 5233 priced Rs. 500 lower offers GPS with free Ovi Maps).

Design & Usability

The Samsung S3650 mobile phone has a distinctive design with a curved back; this makes it comfortable to hold, but it rocks slightly from side to side when placed on a flat surface.

Most of the Samsung S3650's front is taken up by a large 2.8 inch capacitive touch screen. Below the screen sit answer and end call buttons as well as a large back button. The positioning of back button is a little strange; it's where you'd normally expect a menu button or a navigational key. External volume controls on the left and hold and camera keys on the right round out the controls.

Samsung's UI is reasonably intuitive but not without its faults. The widgets aren't labelled in the sidebar, so it's hard to distinguish what many of them do without adding them to the screen. The interface also feels sluggish and although there was no keystroke lag when using the on-screen keyboard, the overall experience with the phone’s touch UI wasn’t good. Also, in spite of its capacitive nature, the phone often failed to respond to touch input.

The Samsung S3650 uses a standard numeric keypad layout with T9 support. It's responsive and easy to use when typing but the positioning of the space button on the right side is awkward. It lacks a QWERTY keyboard and there is no accelerometer, so the orientation of the display doesn't change when you turn the handset sideways.

The S3650 includes photo contacts — a rolodex of frequent contacts with photos that's available through the main menu — and Samsung's smart unlock feature. This lets you unlock the phone by drawing a letter of the alphabet on the lock screen. You can assign any letter from A to Z to open a number of apps including messaging, music and the Web browser.

Multimedia

As a multimedia mobile phone, the Samsung S3650 is let down by the lack of a standard 3.5mm headphone jack. This hinders both the music player and the included FM radio, as the included headphones lack bass and don’t sound as crisp or clear as they should.

The 2MP camera is fair for taking casual pictures although these pictures lack details and are slightly blurry. Videos taken with the camera were really bad even for a 2MP camera.

Bottom Line

The Samsung S3650 Corby is available in India for Rs. 8,000, a price that’s too high in our opinion. Although it sports a spunky design and a number of social networking widgets, its basic performance is lacking and so are its connectivity features. If you really like its looks then you could buy it but we would any day suggest the Nokia 5233 over it.